Making plans for events corporate leaders hope will never happen is a sound business strategy. These so-called business continuity plans (BCP) prepare companies to have a strategic approach for continuing day-to-day operations and serving customers when that unexpected disaster hits, ranging from data breaches to pandemics.
And with COVID-19, specifically in the Contact Center industry, it shows that every company must have a BCP that adopts cloud-based technology.
Backs against the wall
According to consulting company Mercer, 51% of worldwide companies surveyed in February 2020 had no plans or protocols in place for a global emergency, such as coronavirus. While creating survival plans in a period of an unprecedented crisis is daunting, the coronavirus pandemic pushed company decision-makers into that “sink or swim” approach to re-assessing their business capabilities on the fly.
With those “what if” questions clearly exposed, companies discovered various issues related to employees, security, working arrangements, infrastructure and operations to name a few. Finding and fixing those internal vulnerabilities is thus a first step toward building a resilient organization.
Externally, businesses were pushed to the limits in delivering services to meet SLA requirements, as well as still be deemed trust-worthy in the eyes of their clients and customers. Customers are not concerned with operational processes, only that services work. And the fact is, companies that had a BCP in place that used cloud-based technology were able to deliver continuous services better than those that had on-premise deployments.
BCP for contact centers
When disaster strikes, contact centers are vital in keeping lines of communication open with customers. Thus, contact centers must create their BCP with a “last line of defense” approach.
The COVID-19-induced restrictions and social distancing rules meant that supporting customers from a controlled office space was no longer an option. Contact center operations were thrust into the limelight on how to make the seamless transition to connecting agents in a work-from-home environment. For on-premise-based companies, operational deficiencies and inability for agents to log in showed the vulnerability of outdated solutions.
For those centers that already moved to cloud-based solutions, it was business-as-usual as remote agents could quickly connect to the system and serve customers through voice, email, chat, and messaging channels. Additionally, this type of contact center operations saw little to no downturn in employee productivity.
Planning is paramount
In summary, no business really knows the impact of an unforeseen disaster. However, they must be properly prepared with a BCP to keep the business operating functionally. For contact centers, that BCP must include a cloud-based solution (if not already) to deliver service from any controlled or non-controlled agent environment. If you’d like to learn more about our cloud-based contact center solution or schedule a demo, email us at ccaas@leap.tel.